A fresh look and smarter beer styles
July 9, 2026
Two big updates arrived this summer: a redesign of the whole site, and a new way of recording beer styles that keeps a brewer’s own words while making the entire catalog easier to search, sort, and count.
The new look
Every page on Catalog.beer has been redesigned — warmer colors, more comfortable type, and a cleaner layout that puts the beer first. The navigation bar now shows a live count of the brewers and beers in the database, and the search box on the homepage takes you straight to any brewer, beer, or location.
Say it your way
Brewers name beer styles however they like — and they should. A “Hazy Double” reads great on a menu, but a computer can’t tell it’s a kind of IPA. So Catalog.beer now records a beer’s style in two parts: the style name exactly as the brewer wrote it, which is what everyone sees, and a spot in a standard list of styles, which is what lets the catalog answer questions like “show me every IPA.”
The standard list holds 196 styles drawn from the Brewers Association and Beer Judge Certification Program guidelines, and it covers beer, cider, perry, and mead. The new Style field on the add-a-beer and edit-a-beer pages does the matching for you as you type — it knows that “NEIPA,” “New England IPA,” and “Juicy IPA” are all the same style. Only know it’s some kind of IPA? File it at the IPA family and move on. And when a beer truly fits nowhere, there’s always a catch-all — no beer is turned away for being unusual.
For developers
The style vocabulary is part of the API. New read-only /style endpoints return every style, family, and class, along with the other names and spellings that resolve to each — everything you need to build your own style picker or check a label before submitting a beer. The Styles section of the API documentation has the details.
Help us file the catalog
Catalog.beer is community-built and free to build on. If you spot a beer filed under the wrong style, sign in and fix it — or create an account and start cataloging.